Citrus Park is called Citrus Park because citrus groves actually covered this area – farmers planted them in the 1860s, growers shipped the fruit by rail after the Seaboard line came through in the early 1900s. Generations of farmers worked the land for the better part of a century before developers began replacing the groves, especially after the Veterans Expressway opened in the 1990s. That matters for ants specifically: the colonies that lived in that grove soil didn’t disappear when the trees came down. They’re often still there, in the same ground you yard now sits on, which is a big part of why Citrus Park properties can deal with more ant pressure than the age of the house alone would suggests.
What Developers Leave Behind When They Clear a Grove
Clearing a citrus grove for construction doesn’t remove everything that was growing there. Root systems, stumps, and disturbed, organically rich soil often remain in place or collect along the edges of new lots, creating the kind of ground where an ant colony already living in the grove can continue to thrive. Citrus Park’s development history – groves and sawmills giving way to subdivisions largely within the last 30 years – means a lot of the neighborhood sits on land that changed use relatively recently, geologically speaking, even if the house on it looks brand new.
Add Florida’s summer rain on top of that, and the picture gets more active, not less. Heavy rain saturates the soil where a colony has settled, and ants displaced from wet ground tend to move toward whatever’s drier and closer – which, on a lot that used to be part of a working grove, is very often the house.
